Curiously enough, when we came to start work in Iraq, the ruined city of Khorsabad, which Frankfort had chosen as the scene of our first tentative experiment in Mesopotamian archaeology, had something in common with Amamah, in that it also had been built and occupied by a single generation only. One even suspected that Frankfort himself had borne this fact in mind: for we were a very inexperienced party and might well have found the complicated stratification of a more normal mound beyond our capacity to deal with. Let us then consider the circumstances with which we were faced at Khorsabad.
The site lies on a small tributary of the
Tigris, fourteen miles north east of Nineveh, and its history in the records of
archaeology began in 1843, when Emile Botta, then French Consul at Mosul, had
recently begun excavating at Nineveh itself and had, rather surprisingly, so
far met with very little success.
One of his workmen drew his attention to
the mounds at Khorsabad, and, in the manner of excavators at the time, he “put
a gang of men to work there”, visiting them every few days to check their progress.
After a week’s work, it became clear to him that what he had discovered was, to
use his own words “a huge Assyrian palace, containing a large number of
chambers and corridors all the walls of which were lined with slabs, having
sculptured representations of gods and kings, and battles, and religious
ceremonies.
Side by side with these representations
were long inscriptions in the cuneiform character.” In fact, he felt justified
in sending off to the Louvre his famous dispatch, simply saying “Ninive est
retrouve.” It was not of course actually Nineveh, but the palace of King Sargon
II of Assyria in the city of Dur Sharrukin, which he built as his new capital
during the fourth quarter of the eighth century B.c.
Kurdish villagers
At Khorsabad we were living in an empty farmhouse built by Kurdish villagers on the highest part of the main mound. From the roof top one could see the whole conformation of the city’s ruins; an enclosure just under a mile square, surrounded by mud brick walls eighty feet thick, with seven gateways, most of them ornamented originally with winged bull portal sculptures.
Where one stood, level with the centre of
the city on the north side, a vast platform of solid mud brick had been raised
to the full height of the walls, no doubt taking advantage of a more ancient
mound which already existed at that point. It was upon this that Sargon built
the great palace which, with its royal apartments, private temples and
miniature ziggurat tower, forms the basis of the familiar reconstruction
afterwards made by the French excavators.
travel for beauty 